A quarter of workplace PCs harbour smut

ACCORDING TO a series of audits on corporate and public sector networks carried out by PixAlert, 25.8 per cent of 10,000 scanned PCs contained pornography or other not-best-suited-to-the-workplace images.

PixAlert also found that 12.4 per cent of 12,000 scanned email accounts had similar images. Just below 50 per cent showed full nudity or sexual activity, and 0.3 per cent were found to be illegal. 45.2 per cent were sourced from emails, 35.5 per cent of which were sent internally.

Marketing director at PixAlert Andy Churley is concerned at the state of things: "It is clear that a significant number of employees continue to ignore corporate policies and in some cases are going to extraordinary lengths to bypass protection systems," he said. That's dedication to porn, that is.

"Companies are particularly concerned when they have visibility of the number of pornographic images being distributed by email internally or sent out to other organisations using a corporate email address," said Andy. Company productivity is decreasing, too, with an unexplained rise in toilet breaks.

PixAlert warnts that the only effective way to sort out these troublemakers is to use "powerful network audit or real-time monitoring," dare I say it, "solutions" which will weed out the dodgyness. Coincidentally, PixAlert has such a program, called the PixAlert Auditor 3.4. Feeling brainwashed yet?

Here's the website. µ